


Laundry Day

by kryptidkat



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album)
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Oneshot, Venom brothers, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:22:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22737148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kryptidkat/pseuds/kryptidkat
Summary: Kobra and Party are forced to hide in a laundromat to dodge the night patrols. While they're lying low, Party gets hit with another panic — but not for the reason Kobra assumes.
Relationships: Kobra Kid & Party Poison (Danger Days)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 88





	Laundry Day

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Cornerstone13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cornerstone13/gifts).



> wrote this in the span of barely more than 24 hours, so sorry in advance for any mistakes. we die like killjoys

“So did you know there were patrols out when you dragged me here, or was it just our lucky day?” Kobra grumbled, stowing his gun.

_He_ was fine. It maybe should’ve scared him how fine he was, after a surprise attack like that which had left the two of them surrounded by five pig carcasses in the sand stinking to high heaven of burning rubber and flesh. But he could feel Party’s back still pressed against his own, so of course Kobra was fine.

Party didn’t answer.

Kobra stepped away and turned around. “Hey. You good?”

Party clicked in his switchblade without cleaning it. There was blood on his arm – not from a stray shot, which would have just left a burn, but from when the drac he’d been grappling with had tried to wrestle the knife away. He absently turned his forearm this way and that.

Hm. Best give him a minute to snap out of it. In the corner of his eye Kobra spotted Party’s dead gun lying on the ground where Party had tossed it. He picked it up, took the battery pack out of it and slid a spare one from his pocket in, and went back over to Party to stuff it in his holster.

Party barely noticed. He was drawing with one finger in the blood on his arm now, like it was some kind of paint.

Kobra winced a bit at the sight. “Don’t do that.” Party could be such a creep sometimes. “That yours?”

Party gave his arm a swipe with his palm. “Hm. No.”

Well, that was one good thing, at least. “Let’s get to the car. The rest of the patrol will have heard the commotion.” Kobra was already tugging him away.

~

Party slammed the door and stomped around to the front of the trans am to pop the hood. “She’ll run, he said. She’ll get us back to the diner, he said.”

So Kobra was a hacker, not a mechanic, sue him. At least Party wasn’t in shock anymore and could yell at him. “’xcuse me for not being a miracle worker!” he hollered through the windshield.

“Well, get out here and help me repair your repairs.”

Kobra groaned and slid out of his seat, grabbing the toolkit.

An hour later, they were still at it.

“Ugh. I can’t see shit,” Kobra said. “This ain’t a disco, quit strobing that thing in my face.”

“I’m not, it’s just doing that!” Party knocked the flickering, half-dead flashlight against his palm a couple times. It went out. “Camping again. With pigs on the prowl. Shiny.”

“Not here. Not out in the open.” Kobra gathered their tools and threw them in the backseat. “We’ll get jumped. We gotta hide.”

“We’re. Not. Hiding,” Party spat tiredly, regaining some of his fire. “It’s not like they’re crows. We can take ‘em.”

Not in this state, they couldn’t. Kobra glanced around. Assessed their battery stash, their supplies, their geographical advantages. Nil, nil, nil. And the sun was going down besides.

The patrols would still be out tomorrow; they could go back on the hunt then if Party was still feeling bloodthirsty.

“Don’t think of it as hiding. Just…lying low for a bit,” Kobra said in his most reasonable tone.

Party probably hated that tone. But Kobra was right, and he knew Party knew it.

Party probably hated that, too.

“Fine,” Party said.

Yep, he hated it.

~

Which was how they found themselves crammed up against each other between a cobwebby washer and dryer in a long-abandoned Dime’N’Dry that still smelled like dirty socks.

“Your idea, not mine,” Party snarked, though his voice sounded oddly tight. Kobra couldn’t get a read on him, couldn’t see his expression in the dark.

Party’s knee was digging into his side. He shoved it away.

A car slowly rumbled past.

They froze.

The blinding, bluish beam of a searchlight eased over their hiding place, stretching the looming shadows out across the graveyard of laundry appliances before sliding away and melting back into blackness.

Kobra allowed himself a small sigh of relief. Maybe that would be the last car tonight.

But if there was one thing Party couldn’t take, it was silence. The five minutes of deafening quiet that followed must have been an eternity for him.

When Kobra heard the first hitching breath, he thought for a second Party was crying. That would have been seriously fucked up. But no, he was just curled up into himself, privately trying to ward off a sudden bout of panic he couldn’t conceal anymore.

Aw, Party. How long had this been creeping up on him, how long had he been trying to keep it from pulling him under? The clap hadn’t been that bad, had it?

Kobra maneuvered an arm around his brother’s waist, careful to keep his grip firm. It was the weirdest thing, but being on the receiving end of anything resembling gentleness when he was like this just made Party worse. Sometimes Kobra even had to get rough with him in this state to get him to listen at all — _buck up, snap out of it, don’t be a sissy —_ which Kobra always felt bad about afterward even though it worked, so he mostly just did his best to stay nonchalant and act like the whole sucky affair was business as usual. Which, by now, it kind of was. “C’mon, dude, let’s do the thing.”

Party jerked away from his touch. “Fuck — the — thing!” he managed.

“Really? _Now_ you’re going to be a little bitch about this?” Kobra hissed under his breath. He needed to get Party to _shut up._ Another patrol could come by any moment.

“Don’t — touchme.”

Kobra grabbed his arm. “You better start fucking counting right this fucking second or I’ll give you something to panic about.”

Party threw him off, and Kobra nearly got an elbow in the eye.

Okay, so they were doing this the hard way. Party still fought him on this sometimes, even in the throes of it. Kobra scooted over to give him his space, even though the furthest away he could get before running into the wall was like, two inches. “Fine. Let it kick your ass then.”

Party didn’t relent, so then of course Kobra was stuck there between maybe the worst proverbial rock and hard place in the history of rocks and hard places – the narrow crevice between the metal washer and dryer forcing him keep his knees drawn up almost to his chin, and pressed up against the rotting drywall on his left with his big brother on his right, shaking like a little kid who was about to get eaten by a slime monster in a bad horror film. Party didn’t want his help, though, so he wasn’t going to get it.

Kobra clenched his jaw and stared ahead at the washer in front of him and tried to tune everything out. He hated this, the uneven, raspy wheezing sounds Party was making like he’d gotten shot in the lung. It was even worse somehow when Party was trying to do it quietly the way he was now, the fear of being discovered still instinctually at the forefront of his thoughts despite the mindless panic.

Five minutes in, Kobra was starting to second guess his hands-off approach. Shit, this was a bad one. Party was still at it, sounding even more strangled than before.

He ventured a glance over. Party was balled up in a tense huddle, knees to forehead, tremors wracking his tiny frame. In the dark Kobra could just make out that he was clutching his throat, palms clamped tight around the sides of his neck in a desperate attempt to restrict his own airflow.

“Witch, Party, you can’t —” He got Party’s logic here, really he did, because you couldn’t hyperventilate if you couldn’t breathe at all, right? but he was going to hurt himself. “Stop. That’s not gonna help.” He pried Party’s hands away, and Party was too distraught at this point to fight him anymore. “Fuck it, we’re counting, okay? You can chew me out once you can talk.”

And to Party’s credit, he tried. He hid his face in the arm Kobra slung across his knees in a cramped, makeshift hug, panting like a wounded animal and gripping Kobra’s jacket for dear life, but he did his best to respond to Kobra’s murmured instructions.

A billion years later, Party could finally get to eight-count breaths on his own. After a few more minutes of that he lifted his head and slumped back against the dryer, spent.

About time. Kobra gave his hand a squeeze and let him go. He would be okay now, right?

“Sometimes I —" Party began hoarsely, and interrupted himself to huff the bitter laugh he did whenever he was about to say something he knew was ridiculous. “Sometimes I think I’m cursed.”

So they were skipping the chewing out bit entirely, then. Fine by him. Kobra gave Party’s statement a few moments of serious thought.

He had no idea where Party got these ideas from. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“Glad it’s just you, anyway,” Party muttered, almost too low to hear. “The guys…”

“They don’t mind,” Kobra said. If Party really thought any of the guys pitied him or thought any less of him for this, Party needed to get his head screwed back on straight.

“Jet doesn’t —” Party’s voice dropped even lower. “Jet doesn’t trust me anymore. In a fight.”

Bullshit. Kobra pulled up the last half dozen claps in his head, laid them out, extracted any possible evidence. Okay, he had noticed it too — how Jet was always glancing at Party when a clap started getting hot, checking that he hadn’t frozen up or collapsed somewhere.

Jet did that with everyone, though, and with a blind spot to check besides it could seem downright shifty, so Kobra could see where Party got that impression but the hypothesis simply didn’t hold up. “He does.”

“Well he shouldn’t!” Party burst out. His violent, reactive gesture hit the dryer behind him with a hollow, metallic _bang_ , making Kobra start. “Godsdammit, Kobra, fuck. I’m…”

“You’re not,” Kobra said quickly, before Party could finish that sentence. Some things you couldn’t unsay. He grabbed Party’s arm again to steady him, keep him from hitting anything loud again. “You’re not. You’re just human. That’s all.”

“Oh fuck you,” Party said, pretending to be indignant. “I’m Destroya incarnate, didn’t you know? I’m, I’m…” He broke off with a laugh.

Just when Kobra thought he’d heard all of Party’s laughs — picked them apart, decoded them, catalogued them for later reference — one would come spilling out of him Kobra’d never heard before. This one was a skin-crawling combination of exhausted and self-deprecating and helpless and a dozen other things Kobra couldn’t place.

He didn’t know how he was supposed to respond to that laugh.

“You know what day it is?” Party said then, instead of finishing his sentence.

Shiny. Random question time. And there was always _something_ behind Party’s random questions, so Kobra’d better figure it out quick, stay ahead of whatever nonsense conclusion Party was hurtling toward.

Kobra tried to think. The date was usually mentioned in the WKIL morning broadcast. Dr. Death-Defying was pretty much the only person in the zones with a calendar who kept track of such things. He couldn’t remember what it had been today, though. He shrugged in the dark.

“’s my birthday,” Party said. 

“No shit?” Kobra blurted. Granted, birthdays weren’t much of a thing in the City, except that you typically graduated to some new level of — ugh — medications based on where you were developmentally. You mostly didn’t celebrate birthdays in the zones, either. You celebrated name days (or the closest you could guess your name day, at least, because usually you couldn’t pin down the first day you decided on yours). But Kobra still felt like the worst brother ever for not remembering.

“No shit,” said Party. “We left almost five years ago, right? You were 15. I was —” There was that awful choked laugh again. “I’m old, I’m so _old._ I’m so fucking old I might as well be dead.” His voice was just a whisper now, high and terrified. “I’m _dying_ , K, all of us, we’re all —"

And that was all it took to set him off again. 

“Hey, heyheyhey. Hey.” Kobra managed to turn toward Party and get his arms around his shoulders and thank fuck, this time Party didn’t fight him.

He bowled forward into Kobra instead, taking Kobra by surprise and latching onto Kobra’s torso like Kobra was a stuffed animal as he gasped helplessly. Kobra wheezed a little himself from the way Party was squeezing the air out of his ribcage. Gods, this hadn’t been about the clap at all, had it? _This_ was what had been torturing him all this time, in the quiet, in the dark.

And the only thing Kobra could do was rub his back and let him hang on to him.

Party was already worn to the edge of collapse, and there was only so much someone with a body his size could take, so it wasn’t long before he went limp with a muffled sob. Not the crying kind, just the fucking tired kind.

Kobra just kept doing what he was doing, and Party made no move to pull away. Kobra wondered after a while if he’d worn himself out so thoroughly he’d fallen asleep. He’d never had one of these himself, but from the way Party always acted afterwards, they had to be fucking draining. He smelled like blood and sweat and fear, and Kobra wondered — briefly, ridiculously — if they’d have enough time between patrols to wash their jackets, at least. 

“Anyway, Doc is, like, two hundred,” Kobra said at last. A futile attempt at cheering Party up, maybe, but he had to try. 

It made Party sputter a different laugh, at least. “Yeah. Yeah, he is, isn’t he.” He sat up with a groan, though he stayed pressed close against Kobra’s side. He let his head fall back against the washer. 

He didn’t even duck down when another car with a searchlight drove through. Just let his eyes drift shut to block out the brightness as it swept across the laundromat until it passed them by. 

Kobra could imagine then a little how close to death Party must feel, with the naked exhaustion written all over his face he was too tired to hide making him look much older than the 21 — no, 22 now — year old he was. 

He could get that Party would be freaked out about the idea of any of the others dying — they were all in a cage match to the death with that fear every day — but he didn’t really get the part about being afraid for yourself. Party might not be thrilled about his rapidly disappearing time; Kobra was just glad Party had been here with him for another year. Maybe it was just sheer chance or Witch’s luck or something else, because the tiniest twist of fate in any of the claps and runs and raids they’d found themselves in could have torn Party away from him forever and Kobra would be the last one standing. It hadn’t, though. Not yet. Not for good. 

If you thought of it like that, maybe birthdays weren’t so bad.

“Beats laundry day, at any rate.” Kobra said once the car was gone, and lobbed a dryer ball at Party. 

“Not convinced.” Party made no attempt to catch it. Crammed together like they were, Kobra couldn’t miss the occasional uneven breath or involuntary shivers that were running through Party’s body, aftershocks still hitting even through his fatigue. “Fuck.” 

“You good?” 

“Oh I’m great,” Party said dryly. “Shiny. Never better. Having _loads_ of fun.”

Kobra felt the corner of his mouth twitch without his permission. “Just so long as you aren’t thinkin’ about _throwing in the towel.”_

“Nah.” Party glanced over at him briefly, a glint of eyes in the dark, before going back to staring out at nothing. Even though he was joking, there was a bitter edge to his tone. “This vicious _cycle_ ’s got me whipped, that’s all.” 

Kobra had to huff at that, but he couldn’t think of any more clever retorts. 

“There’s shit for this too, ya know,” he said instead. A bit meanly, perhaps. Though not entirely unprovoked, because Party was the one who watched Kobra like a hawk every morning to make sure he took his anti-whatevers, and Party wasn’t gonna stop doing it until the day one of them dropped dead whether Kobra liked it or not. 

Party scoffed. “Just what this rebellion needs. Party Poison, doped up to hell on benzodiazepines.” 

“Oh, I see. So you can literally dish it out but you can’t take it,” Kobra deadpanned, and got whacked for it. He knew it was coming and would have dodged, but he had nowhere to dodge _to._ “Lemme guess, ‘It’s different.’” 

“Shut up.”

So Kobra shut up. Mostly, anyway. 

He wormed into his usual spot, pressed up against Party’s side with his head nestled into the crook of Party’s neck. 

“Happy birthday, Party,” he said.

Patrol cars and their searchlights kept crawling past all night, until the beams and shadows and sound of distant engines all blurred together into a hazy nonsense dream. Until the only sure thing in the world was the warm, solid shoulder against Kobra’s. 

**Author's Note:**

> Based (very loosely) on a prompt from Cornerstone13 — happy birthday, dude!
> 
> Come [yell at me on tumblr ](https://kryptidkat.tumblr.com) — my inbox is always open! ^.^


End file.
